Re: Fork

["William M. Quarles" <walrus at bellsouth dot net>]

Paul Brook wrote:
> On Sunday 23 May 2004 02:31, William M. Quarles wrote:
>
> > Why did you fork from the g95 project?  Isn't that counter-productive to
> > getting a GNU FORTRAN 95 compiler out there (now seven years after the
> > standard was published)?
>
>
> The reasons for the fork were described in out inital announcement of the 
> fork. This can be found here:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=2877571
>
> Paul

Well, I definitely agree that it was the right thing to do after reading 
that e-mail (not that my opinion matters much).  A totalitarian CVS 
write policy certainly discourages community and progress.  Keeping 
everything geared toward GCC also seems to be the right thing to do. 
The only problem seems to be that the e-mail says

>  1) Quick inclusion in GCC. 
>  G95 is not quite ready yet, but we believe that we can finish it faster
>  when we"re in the GCC CVS repository.

Just by looking at the surface websites, it seems hard to tell which of 
you is ahead 16 months after the fork.  But I wish both of you well.

BTW, I have a suggestion for GFortran (although if this has been 
suggested before, count it as a vote).  A lot of universities like to 
use the F and Lahey's ELF90 compilers because they teach students to use 
the newer better code of FORTRAN 90, while leaving the redundant and 
deprecated FORTRAN 77 commands behind (also good because people tell me 
that some 77 code can't communicate with 90/95 code).  These compilers 
also run a lot faster than full-fledged FORTRAN compilers and can 
produce better, faster programs because they don't have to worry about 
all of that extra baggage.  It would be nice if GFortran included a 
commandline option for Essential FOTRAN 90/95 compilation.  This would 
fill the niche for these universities, and also provide a mode for 
gfortran that compiles faster for modern code.  This could also give 
some stimulus to switch for those programmers who keep using FORTRAN 77 
because FORTRAN 77 performs faster.  Perhaps a separate binary would be 
the best way to accomplish this, I don't know.

Peace,
William